News

Thursday, 17th May 2007 23:29

Well, ain't this a doozy! You put somethign aside for a moment to take care of some business and before you know it it's 2 months later and you have no clue what happened!

Ok, here we go. We've finally added a bunch of stuff we had steaming in the test area since March. We got nice thumbnailed archived puzzles so you can replay "yesteryears" games. Right now they are all lumped together on a single page, we'll organize that better eventually.

Then there is a comment system so you can let us, and each other know if you're having trouble with a game or found it too easy. Right now that's an external comment system, small steps, steady steps...

Last but not least there is some invisible under the hood kinda stuff. Such as an edit mode where you can modify the game in your browser and upload it back for others to play, and finally a sort-of sign in system where you can type in your name and store the time and score of your game. Of course taht's behind the scenes stuff, so you can't see it yet, so it doesn't do you any good right now!

I want to appologize to those of you who enjoy this game and kept coming back hoping for the promised features. I got some demand-resistance issues I'm working through right now. Please believe me when I say I think of Buttonia a lot and have in no way given up all those grand future plans for it. Peace out...

Monday, 5th March 2007 09:50

Ok, it's been a while since the last news, but that is becasue we've been busy at work! We've added a TON of features. "Where are they?" I hear you ask. Well, they have not gone live yet. We still need a bit of time to polish them and add some GUI enhancements to make the new features available.

Here is a little preview of what you can expect later this week. We've finally got the archive working, complete with live thumbnails for each past game. We added some features to start collecting info on you players so you can maintain your high scores between sessions. We also have a working prototype of a puzzle editor with which you can create your own puzzles to share. But as you can imagine we have to make sure everything works perfectly, so please have a few days more patience!

In the meantime, please vote for Buttonia at Apex Web Gaming. It just encourages us to do more.

Monday, 26th February 2007 15:22

Great things are afoot! I'm now working on what will be one of the biggest steps towards teh beta release. Soon we will be able to make all past games available for replay in an archive. We're also working on two other updates, namely a game editor which will later lead to user created games. And prize competitions with weekly prizes (likely soemthing small but awsome, like an official Buttonia.com t-shirt!).

Stay tuned, this stiff is likely to hit the site this and next week!

Friday, 23th February 2007 01:11

A couple of small fixes, check out the changes. I've added a timer today showing when the new games come around. Currently that is every 24 hours at midnight UTC+1. I hope that will encourage some of you to come back more frequently. If there is positive feedback, we might change the interval to 12 or even 6 hours, so you can have puzzle fun several times a day for you frequent puzzlers out there.

Addendum: Just had an idea I better write down before I forget. I was thinking of chess, and was wondering if we could have a multiplayer version of Buttonia. Sort of like the old gameboy tetris where certain moves would inhibit the other player and make their life harder. Perhaps two player working on the same board, one trying to lower the buttons the other trying to raise them. Perhaps with additional rules such as you cannot touch the last 5 buttons (greyed out) that have been moved. Or that two palyers work on their own games with extra special buttons that also affect a button on the opponents board. So you might have to press that button from time to time to slow down your opponent while makign sure it doesn't hold back your own game. If any of you think these are good ideas and would play such a beast please give me some feedback.

Thursday, 22th February 2007 01:22

We've finally added some stats. After the recent internal updates it was surprisingly easy and painless. Now you can see the best and average times and move counts. I hope people will now be encouraged to improve their own times as well as the oeverall average. Furthermore you can now know for sure if a game is possible and somebody else has already solved it.

Currently we try to play each game when it's released around midnight. If a game isn't solvable we replace it with a new one. You should be able to see our efforts now when solved games are still few.

Sunday, 18th February 2007 00:20

Sorry about the long break, I've had to uhm... work I guess. Unfortunately Buttonia doesn't count as work, it's fun! (It really is.) Well, there was a spike in traffic today and I had to check out where it came from. I'm proud to say we now have a review in japanese (no1game.net) (translation)! Another language we have to consider when we go multi-lingual I guess!

It's pretty amazing to have traffic from so many different countries and find these reviews in different langauges. I must say this is really something that sets making an online game apart from any other type of online activity. There is just all this enthusiasm and excitement out there for anything new.

Well, welcome to our japanese visitors and I hope you enjoy the game.

Wednesday, 13th February 2007 19:23

A screenshot at Passion For Puzzles came out looking really good. I gotta control my release method a little since a bug crawled in yesterday. We fixed it quickly and are working feverishly behind the scenes to implement the community features.

We're also working on a Buttonia solving AI. This, in future will hopefully allow us to generate better puzzles and avoid impossible combinations. This may be a tall order though, as the 6x6 puzzle reaches over 68 billion combinations!

Wednesday, 7th February 2007 10:50

Looks like Buttonia is popular with french fans. Perhaps we should plan for translations in the future. What do you think?

Wednesday, 7th February 2007 01:56

Got a nasty cold, so no updates today. Traffic is still going up with most of you coming here from StumbleUpon.com.

We have a lot of data now for the games, so the next step will be the user registration so we can keep your past game data together and give you the ratings and stats in the future. Currently we only have one game per day for each size. We want to have user rankings for their difficulty so you can easily pick a game of the right difficulty level. Daily games will keep the comments together and will give you the knowledge that others are struggling with the same puzzles as you are. But I know there will be lots of puzzle addicts who want to play more different games each day. So in future we might have more games as well.

Please don't hesitate to drop me a line if you have any ideas, suggestions or bug reports. This is an alpha test for a good reason! Enjoy today's games!

Tuesday, 6th February 2007 15:23

FreeGamesNews.com seems really popular, and they also done a translation of their Buttonia review of Buttonia in french!

Tuesday, 6th February 2007 02:33

Getting Traffic today from StumbleUpon.com. Looks like somebody liked and reviewed the game there. If you use the StumbleUpon Toolbar, please stumble us here: Stumble It!.

Here are some of the references to Buttonia:

Monday, 5th February 2007

Hey, appearrantly people like this game! In fact, quite unexpectedly we found ourselves in a news article. Go and and check it out at Buttonia Free Games News. They compared it to a game called Lights Out (Wikipedia), and while there are certain similarities in the game mechanics, I would venture a guess that Buttonia is a million times more fun. Also, I can't say I was familiar with Lights Out when I created buttonia. It was actually called UpDown originally when I wrote it in Pascal about 12 years ago in school!

Saturday, 3rd February 2007

Somebody posted Buttonia on Digg. Looks like we should've kept the alpha more under wraps. Well the pressure is on to get the beta features all implemented. Please play lots of games so we can collect data. Digg article: Buttonia - a simple puzzle game that can be very tricky to solve.

Friday, 2nd February 2007

Official Alpha Launch! Finally we have something to collect data from our alpha testers. We fixed the flicker issue with IE and should have smooth performance now. We temporarily disabled the loading screen for the images, but it should be back soon. Please take a minute when u can and play a few games. We need to see how fast people solve them and if some are unsolveable so we can optimize the creation algorithms and have data for the upcoming games archive.